A prose poem published by Stone of Madness Press, Issue 29. April, 2025.
Letters to Women from a Deceased Gay Man
Climbing the ruins at Monte Alban in the rain. Ducking in a cave where we met a random child hawking a fake clay horse and you point out, well, the clay, our source and end, is not fake. Standing together outside the Queen of Missions after a family wedding looking out through the pepper tree branches to the wide bay, tides rising on a south swell. Your agreeable opening, dry and friendly, to take me inside you. “Good ball” you say afterwards and I am astonished you think this lie is any kind of shelter, but it is your kindness that wraps me. Lying on the beach in August willing and cautious to answer your questions as you point to other women walking past and ask if they are or are not as heavy as you. Your eulogy at my funeral after you died too soon. In the sculpture garden after the Grammatology seminar the severed saints asking for your telephone number. Seeing the harrowing beauty of your grandchildren; seeing your beauty rise, brightening all the corners and screens as your love for them unfolds and surprises. Living in your sadness as you died before having a grandchild. Holding each other on a broken cot while Mahler’s 3rd perfused the beach shack under the jacaranda and tar.
Your bailing me out of jail.
Your making sure I didn’t get fired.
Camping in a field in the Rhône valley after hitchhiking to a
medieval farm when we were picked up by an old man in a rusted Citroën who was
annoyed at our partial French. Letting our dogs run wild with each other. Your
dog jumping on the table to eat rhubarb pie. Our dog’s favorite chew toy you
left her, and then left us shortly after. Forever shortly after. Your not
coming home because you slept with a doctor.
Your telling me. My hearing it. My playing Death and the Flower endlessly,
subversively. Your mother calling my mother asking for the watch back. My ignoring time. My giving you a rabbit’s foot for Christmas
and declaring eternal fealty and the rabbit just dead, perhaps not eternal at
all. We agreeing to a time out. Riding horseback through piñon pines to DH
Lawrence’s grave as my horse farted like mountain thunder and my heart was held
up and back in your rose-strewn panteón. Your singing Every Grain of Sand at my
funeral because you are still alive. Listening about your surrender to a
Hollywood producer in front of his fireplace on Mullholland and he never called
you back even as your gold necklace shimmered in perfected light. Meeting your
husband, meeting your husband, hearing about your husband shot in his Porsche
in Sequoia National Park trying to buy kilos, then meeting your husband, meeting
your husband, attending your husband’s funeral after a lifetime of civic
service and professional status. Hiding in your guest room after my eviction. You
never had a husband. You owned Alhambra. You never needed a husband to buy a
town. You never needed a husband to own a company. You never needed a husband until you did and
then he died taking a nap on your perfect sofa. My outliving you and just as
cause gives birth to effect so my funeral quickly disposes of my solitary
remains while love is eternal and that’s not good news. You walking across a
bar band’s sunset set by the inevitable beach as you danced your cancer away on
one leg, glistening against death to its own relief – you scared it away. My holding
your purse as you moved on to the stuffy ballroom on the second floor of the sobaco
on Whittier Blvd. Your standing in front
of the crazed movie star at my mother’s funeral; your stance the strength that
kept her from touching and kept me alive long enough to write this love letter.
Your stories of tennis and Bobby Short at the Carlyle and the deep fall into
racism that life’s pace and a poem’s clutter crowds out with too little of too
much memory. Love outlasting us. Juan Gabriel singing Se me olvidó otra vez as
I watched you dance with him, with him, with him, while we put “no expiration”
on another love we shared and shared and shared and outlasted. Your taking me
to visit your son in rehab. Your
visiting me in rehab. More than once. No, I mean more than one rehab. My hubris at being 5150’d, also in Alhambra.
My hubris wrapped in your love, like bubble paper, like pastry, like a
sarcophagus. Your keeping track of my beloved husband after my death but you
died too soon. My love immolating all it touches, and in such a fire our bodies
join as one Pristine Cause and the fire takes us away from memory, away from
the Dark Powers eating our lives, and revives the New Age of our youth when we
traveled and danced and did not worry about what we were doing wrong. Death is
a dance. Death is a dance. Dead Can Dance. Kiss me on the bus. It piques my
interest. Oh how you held me. Oh how we danced.
And none of you will live long enough to walk with my husband to the top
of Rocky Ridge to toss my ashes off into Pacific tides that dance before us and
after us and frame the infinite collapse of love in all its forms, all its
days, all its words seeking equanimity in a world that only falls, only falls,
only falls in love.
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